March 2024
Rev. L. Grace Harmon
Recently, I had the privilege of taking a group of clergy people in the ordination process to Philadelphia for a Methodist history tour. I had so much fun seeing the city I love through the fresh eyes of these new friends. And I realized how blessed I have been to spend so much time immersed in the ways that history and the present are connected.
We are all more connected to history than we seem to realize. But, Methodists are connected to history in all sorts of ways we overlook. In the Easter season, I think it matters, because our history may well point the way to our resurrection in the here and now.
As shrinking congregations, divisions over inclusion, finite resources, and overall anxiety about a future we are struggling to see clearly define so much of our lives together, I find it comforting and inspiring to consider where we came from in discerning where we go next.
Methodism is about the same age as the idea of the nation. The first two Methodist Society meeting houses were John Street in Manhattan (1766) and St. George’s in Philadelphia (1767). They were quickly joined by many outposts in the mid-Atlantic. The growth of Methodism in those early years was deeply linked to Wesley’s staunch abolitionism. In 1771, the first and most prominent of Methodist clergy people sent here, Francis Asbury, risked being killed by slavers to come to the colonies and share a Gospel of love and inclusion. In 1784, Richard Allen was made a licensed lay preacher, the first Black person so designated, four years after Pennsylvania becomes the first state to abolish slavery.
Early Methodists were known for their enthusiasm and their unseemly commitment to faith practices that transcended worship. Early Methodists built hospitals, schools, and universities. There was a strong sense of accountability to one another – it isn’t easy to be counter cultural alone. So Methodists not only went to church, they agreed to meet in small groups for study, prayer, and mutual support. Methodism grew because it offered something different, something fresh, something profoundly relevant that answered the questions most pressing upon the hearts and minds of individuals and the collective imagination of what a new nation could be, if it were to be its very best.
It is a rosy picture – if only people were not so predictably people-y. Methodists began to bend to the pressures of the culture almost as quickly as they had resolved to reject them. It only took three years from granting Richard Allen the right to preach, before the trustees of St. George insisted that he and the other Black members of the society be forced out of the church, presaging the increasingly murky thinking of formerly staunch abolitionists – the first fugitive slave act was passed in 1793.
Slavery wasn’t the only place that we started strong and lost our way, though it might well be the one that has had the most devastating long-term consequences. Methodists have always been adamant supporters of temperance, standing in opposition to alcohol (gin was commonly known as Mother’s Ruin for many decades). When Methodist women joined the fight in earnest, they both showed the power and influence they could wield and how stubbornly they could hold to a position regardless of the evident impact: Prohibition turned a problematic situation into the fertile ground in which organized crime could thrive.
As Methodists became more and more numerous, they had a subtle but pivotal choice. They could either become more or less like the other religious organizations around them. With their growth in numbers they also gained influence, education, and access to power. The desire to fit in with the normative culture of the powerful became greater and greater. It is my belief that this is the start of our demise, quietly poisoning even the shining moments of our history.
When Methodists ceded the moral high ground on slavery and therefore on the inalienable full humanity and equal wisdom of Black people, the seeds were planted for our current conflict over LGBTQIA inclusion. It was in that decision that we decided we would compromise almost anything for a veneer of unity, glossing over those who were chewed up in the grist mill of social climbing and progress. We kept our Social Principles as a hallmark of our life together, we just became less committed to living them and more committed to pointing to them with self-satisfaction.
We are at an undeniable crossroads. It is more than time to go back to our roots, to our founding, and strip away anything and everything that has moved us farther and farther from our original and most noble ideals. We were never meant to be a people focused on Sunday worship styles. Our buildings were not originally conceived as anything other than rallying points for social change and mutual aid. We were always supposed to be the people who were more engaged, more serious, more joy-filled, more creative, and more nimble. It is my belief that every time we have tried to be more respectable and more normal we have become less holy.
By our very nature, we are called to be revivalists, people of new beginnings and co-creators of little resurrections – the ‘humble’ miracles of mutual care that change the world, re-form a nation, and create a moral compass rather than insist on a doctrine of morality.
As we bask in the Easter story, let us remember where we’ve come from as we dream about the shape our resurrection life should take. As we enter a season of Holy Conferencing (General and Annual Conference) that rarely feels very holy, let us resolve to go against the pressure to be normal and covenant to be contrarian for the sake of the Gospel.
Knowing even this small fraction of what we have as a legacy, can you begin to perceive what could lay before us, if we allow our hearts to be strangely warmed? Let us dream together, a generation of Easter People, seeking the best methods of living Good News for a season such as this.
